ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Vasquez’s scholarship on the lived body as a site for spiritual experience to explore notions of the New Age and its embodied presence in Jerzy Grotowski’s Theatre of Productions phase. It examines the paratheatre work and beehives in light of Grotowski’s personally motivated drive to be on a constant quest, which converged with the new ideas emerging from the counter-culture of the 1960s, particularly with those ideas which later became associated with the New Age. In paratheatre activity the commitment was to the transformation and refinement of the self. Certainly one socially accepted mainstay of theatre has always been the obvious divide between audience and performer. Rejecting the cultural standards of traditional theatre, Grotowski’s transformative and historically unique work of paratheatre eradicated the division between performer and observer. Polish cultural historian and theatre scholar Jan Blonnski notes that Grotowski’s drive to create paratheatre was based on his desire to transform the spectator in some way.
